


Backwoods Days

by Jennybel75



Series: The Poets Series [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-29
Updated: 2012-03-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 17:20:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/371472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennybel75/pseuds/Jennybel75
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loving someone truly is a series of small deaths, so they say</p>
            </blockquote>





	Backwoods Days

John was familiar with the old saying that there were three easy ways to die:

Smoke a cigar daily and you will die ten years early.  
Drink rum daily and you will die thirty years early.  
Love someone truly and you will die daily...

As a doctor he certainly knew the first two to be true, even if he wasn’t quite sure the figures quoted were accurate.

As a soldier he also knew there were many other easy (horrifying, bloody) ways in which a body could stop working well before its allotted years.

But as a man, he’d never really thought the third part of the adage was true. After all, love was meant to be joyous and full of light, the stuff of faerie tales. John now realised that he’d forgotten that most faerie tales had dark origins. After all, the little mermaid and Odette and her Prince all died despite their true love, or was it perhaps because of it? He wasn’t too clear on that last point.

What he was clear on, now, since Sherlock... since the Fall, was that loving someone truly was a series of deaths. He’d never noticed it before, and he supposed that was because they were mostly small deaths, like when Sherlock was gone on a case and John didn’t hear from him for days. Or if he was in one of his moods and ignored John completely. Or when Sherlock was sick with the flu and there was nothing John could do to make him feel better or heal quicker. He could go on, but what was the point? They were microcuts all, when compared to the deaths he’d experienced since Sherlock fell.

The death that came when he understood, after that brief blissful time upon waking where all was good with the world, that he was no longer living at Baker St, and why that was. The death that was the way his heart would skip and race when he caught a glimpse of dark curly hair and a long coat in a crowd, only for it to plummet again when he realised the person couldn’t possibly be who he hoped it was. The death that occurred every time he remembered that he'd forever lost the chance to tell Sherlock how he felt. How he'd progressed from flatmate to best friend to beloved.

These were John's thoughts as he made his way slowly up the stairs to his flat. He'd got used to the silence over the last six months, but he didn't think he'd ever get used to the emptiness which consumed him, or the greyness with which everything now seem to be tinged.

He paused, hand on the doorknob, sighed and shook his head to try and clear his thoughts. His mother always said there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on the past, but it was much easier said than done.

Opening the door, he stepped into the flat, blinking at the unexpected light. The lamp was on, casting a soft golden glow over the tall, curly-haired figure sitting in the chair.

Well, he thought as his heart pounded in his ears and the world seemed to tip on its axis, he'd been wrong before, because this, this was what death from truly loving someone must be like.

_"John."_

And the grey started to fade a little.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Alexander Pushkin poem The Wonderous Moment of Our Meeting  
> http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/alexander_pushkin/poems/1910


End file.
